Oi, Watch it!
The new weekly must-watch list from White Noise
Welcome to your every-week curated-from-the-chaos list of the best stuff to fill your screens with over the next seven days. The new, the old; on linear, on streaming; the forgotten, the fresh, and the fully fucking fantastic. Am I missing something? Tell me in the comments…
A New Buried Gem//The Case of Barbara Nelson
The antithesis of the sensationalist, slap-dash true-crime slop usually tossed up on YouTube, ‘The Local Whisper’ is an ongoing series of original documentaries - each months in the making - shining a light on those cases long cold and long ignored by media. Just the second film in two years, The Case of Barbara Nelson digs deep into the unsolved 1980s abduction and murder of Wisconsin woman Barbara Nelson. The Local Whisper team of emerging filmmakers - director Regan Ernst, producer Evanna Milea, and co-DPs Jo Willenbrink and Taylor Bevirt - say they’re ‘inspired by detective stories and true investigative journalism’. The result: excellent (excellent) films that are ethically made, robustly researched, rigorously investigated, sensitively presented, beautifully shot and victim-centred. That may even, wait for this, help people. WHAT SORCERY IS THIS. My find of the year, brothers and sisters.
Watch The Case of Barbara Nelson on YouTube now
New Film Friday//Bread & Roses
This urgent, ferocious film (an Apple Original) was the idea that followed actor Jennifer Lawrence’s devastation and fury at the Taliban’s oppression of women and girls after the fall of Kabul (and the withdrawal of US troops). She recruited blazing Afghani director Sahra Mani (A Thousand Girls Like Me), who was already gathering footage, vital first-person testimonies, from women on the ground (they were joined by Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai as a producer). There was one additional occasional cameraperson - it wasn’t safe for crew to enter the country - but this is a film built almost entirely from raw footage captured by three women - Zahra, Sharifa, Taranom - who are facing daily life with their most basic rights removed, brutality if (when) they fight it. It’s brave, upsetting, righteous stuff, rarely told by those living it.
Bread & Roses premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday (22nd)
New Telly To Tune In For//Boybands Forever
This three-part BBC documentary series on the age of the boyband - which boasts access to the pop stars, the svengalis and the journalists of the time - is eye-opening and surprisingly, extraordinarily moving. Each episode begins with narration hailing “a time when working-class boys were celebrated for singing and dancing in tight formation”. Or, as I’d put it by the end of the final episode, “a time when working-class boys had their bodies, talent and insecurities exploited by middle-class money men who rinsed and then ditched them when they expressed the slightest desire to be treated like a human being". But, you know, each to their own.
Episode three of Boybands Forever is on BBC Two, Saturday (23rd) at 9:25pm. All episodes are now on iPlayer
Catch a Classic Live//Raging Bull
Is Scorsese ever better than when he’s squatting in the loss, impotency and tragedy caused by a specific kind of self-destructive masculinity? (This is not a hypothetical question, the answer is NO, clearly). And no other film does it more powerfully than his De Niro-starring masterpiece, Raging Bull - a brutal portrait of the rise and fall (and fall) of Bronx boxer Jake La Motta, a man who feels at home only in the smallest, darkest corners of violence. Everyone involved is on the form of their lives - Scorsese, De Niro, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Michael Chapman and sound design god Frank Warner. It’s what the word visceral is meant for: blood splashing, bone crunching, a sponge dripping water (anointing a martyr).And if this doesn’t sufficiently scratch your Scorsese itch, he’s also the subject of this week’s episode of The Directors on Sky Arts immediately before the film airs (Sunday at 9pm).
Watch Raging Bull this Sunday (24th) on BBC Two at 10pm
From Big Screen To Small//The Substance
I mean, what is there left to say about one of this year’s greatest films? (That I didn’t say here anyway). Perhaps just that Demi Moore has never made a greater call; Coralie Fargeat is one of the most exciting filmmakers working right now; and that the last twenty minutes is the greatest argument for a full-throated return to practical effects - and specifically prosthetics - in contemporary film. If you didn’t watch it on the big screen, you truly missed the experience of the year, but now it’s arrived on digital, watching it at home with the volume and vibes turned way up will absolutely do instead.
Watch The Substance on MUBI right now. Seriously, run
You Might Have Missed//Little Miss Innocent
This exceptionally-made, skilfully-handled (and judged) documentary is built around the first interview with Kaitlyn Conley, several years after she was convicted of killing her boss (and ex-boyfriend’s mam) Mary Yoder. There’s so much I want to say - but can’t because of SPOILERS - so I’ll simply say, holy shiittttttttttt. Is it right to give a convicted killer this platform? One who’s still so actively campaigning to prove her innocence? The answer really depends on whether you buy what she’s selling or think this simply reinforces her guilt…
Watch Little Miss Innocent: Passion, Poison. Prison on Disney+ now
Saturday Night’s Settee Pick//Shirley Valentine
Shirley Valentine walked so that Fleabag could run (rings around a hot priest). Willy Russell’s hit one-woman play about a Scouse housewife thirsty for life made it to screen in 1989, the film smashing through the fourth wall, often by using the actual kitchen wall. Shirley Valentine’s genius has sometimes been misunderstood and/or entirely unappreciated (I’m looking at you and your one-star “a realist drama of appalling banality” review, usual-fave Roger Ebert), but any woman who’s fried an egg for a man who moans about the yolk while your beautiful brain shrinks and your libido goes for a lie down WILL KNOW.
Hey Terri! My name is Jo Willenbrink and I'm one of the Co-DPs on The Local Whisper. On behalf of Regan and the rest of the crew I wanted to say a HUGE thank you for the shoutout! We work on a shoestring budget so any help getting the word out about these cases means the world to us! Thanks so much!
Fab list! I've shared the link on Bluesky :)